My history with the works of Dickens is not comprehensive, essentially composed of reading 'A Tale Of Two Cities' and 'David Copperfield' in their entireties and falling out of 'The Old Curiousity Shop' and 'The Pickwick Papers' at very early stages. The lack of large scale drama, or the personal natures of the stories somehow didn't appeal. Only 'A Tale of Two Cities' so far is a classic and a book I have and will reread. 'A Tale Of Two Cities' is special without being atypical, and streamlined in ways his other books weren't.
So, it's a tale of two cities, those cities being London and Paris, both cities I have passed through very recently indeed. They look quite different now, London especially, and they form the backdrop for a novel I reread while on holiday. It's quite difficult to summarise, but an attempt must be made. We begin in the years immediately preceding the French revolution, where a victimized and imprisoned French doctor, driven beyond his wits, his rescued by his long absent daughter and a mutual friend, leading to a new life in London. Then we roll forward to the daughter falling for another French exile and marrying, a family, the revolution, and a valorous journey which puts the husband's life into certain doom at the Guillotine. Unlike a standard historical potboiler tragedy, the man is saved, and he is saved by one of the first anti-heroes in fiction and it is fascinating.
The two strands to the story of 'A Tale Of Two Cities' are the narrative around Dr Manette, his daughter Lucie and her husband Charles Darnay, and the story of Paris itself through the revolution. It's hard to know how much of it was planned carefully, but the lovingness of the family unit is directly contrasted (juxtaposed?) with the horrific barbarity of a city on fire with murder, vengeance and cruelty. If ever there was a demonstration of two wrongs not making a right, it was in the aftermath of the French revolution, a period so revolting in its causes and effects that the best parts of humanity itself were suspended.
Dickens revelled in domestic and personal stories, which were in many ways the only types widely available at the time, Wilkie Collins only inventing the full length mystery with 'The Moonstone' in (1868) and Dickens himself building the idea of a ghost story himself. Here the intertwined historical catastrophe that was France, and in the not too distant history at that point in time, with the joint destinies of Manette's family and their friends really supply two entirely different scales of storytelling. It is exceedingly strange that I should like this book, having said all that, and ultimately it has to be down to the innate genius of Dickens, the extreme stripped down nature of the book compared to his others, and the one character who stands the work on its head and makes it distinct from other examples. That character's name is Sydney Carton, the self-confessed failure, the holder of an unrequited and unfulfilled love for the Manette daughter and the man who goes to die for her husband so that the family might get away unscathed. He is the true agonized hero who comes through in the end, not only sacrificing himself for the woman he adores, but orchestrating the final plan to deliberately make that sacrifice. Is he unique in Dickens literature? Can anyone say? Certainly he is the first point of empathy for the individual estranged from humanity to a large extent, mostly by his own actions and self-loathing. Many people can connect to Carton rather than the otherwise perfect characters of the family he saves, especially in the valour of his dying moments.
Perhaps the appeal is in the scathing puncturing of both sides in the revolution? Or is there an anti-French prejudice peeking through in the narrative? It's hard to say as the revolution did more damage in that respect than any amount of novel writing could. Is it the odd Dickensian humour of Jerry Cruncher and Miss Pross? Or is it all down to the mixed scales of the narrative adding immeasurable depth to what can be conceivably be called a juvenile adventure? Is it a juvenile adventure really? Whatever it was it must have been groundbreaking at the time.
O.
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